Still Time To Wonder

Fountains Abbey & Studley Royal

This book documents a body of work begun early in 2019, commissioned by the National Trust the preceding year. I was given an open, creative brief, with time to become truly familiar with the territory. Inspiration came early from the extraordinary ancient trees of the deer park. I was particularly moved by the gigantic carcasses of dead trees and their branches lying on the ground; sculptural and organic, they are returning their biomass and energy to the land that bore them.

With each visit I started to find compositions which reflected my sense of place. When I stayed overnight I had a chance to walk the grounds early and late, seeing the estate at its quietest, at sunrise, sunset and in twilight.

In March 2020 the covid-19 pandemic brought an abrupt halt to visits. But with the support of Justin Scully and the NT Fountains team I resumed photography here in the summer of 2020, and continued throughout all seasons in 2021. The final images in the exhibition were taken in early 2022. Made before, during and approaching the end of the covid pandemic, 2019 - 2022, the creative process has bridged a significant moment in history.

Undeniably, most of my work falls firmly within the eyewitness tradition of documentary photography. That is certainly true of the Fountains Abbey project. Sometimes significant editing is required to achieve a balance of colour, tone, and sense of light in the final print. The goal is to bring the landscape and its details to life; essentially, to ensure it has its own reality. And reality is the goal for anyone whose mission is to photograph the world as it is, in any given moment. This may not sound like a particularly “creative” process, especially in a digital world where departure away from facts and into fantasy is incredibly easy. Nevertheless, an enormous amount of creative effort and energy is used in considering how to frame any scene, and to do so with a high level of craft, and then to translate that depiction into a convincing print on paper.

I believe that photography can work on multiple levels, offering, as the photographer and polemicist RobertAdams has said, three verities – geography, autobiography, and metaphor. All three are important aspects for the landscape artist, and given the uncertain future, the role of photographer as geographer now matters more than ever.

My wanderings around the site provoked rumination on the history, mission and meaning of the Abbey and its landscape, humanity and the wider world. I began to gather those thoughts into written form; an edited stream of ideas and reflections. These were recorded for listening via headphones in the exhibition. Here they appear towards the end of the book in written form, entitled, “Passage of Time”. I hope the words make a useful counterpoint, and complement the photographs.

We live in an anxious age, overshadowed by climate change, habitat loss, global pandemics, and geo-political conflict. Yet I am an optimist, a condition developed partly from photographing the resilience and bounce-back-ability of nature over the course of four decades. I hope my work shows that nature and humanity are deeply connected. We depend on clean air, water, and soil fertility for life, but we also need nature's beauty on a spiritual level.

Why, “Still Time to Wonder”? Firstly the word Still is the essence of the photographer's art. A photograph is a crystallised moment and must work as such. Secondly, Time is also photographically fundamental as the word moment suggests. A photograph is a manifestation from the Space/Time/Form continuum. Time also has a special meaning for this work which was extended by a year due to the pandemic. Time to walk, to think, to reflect; and then time to repeat. Time was the gift I was given.

Finally, the Wonder of the North is a title bestowed on Fountains by Mark Newman, via 18th century commentator John Tracy Atkins. To borrow Wonder from them is to respect and confirm an impression of the place that most will share. Wonder in my title though is a verb. In this sense it evokes a leap of the imagination, a suitable metaphor for this wonderful landscape.

Joe Cornish | October 2022